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Thursday, November 08, 2007

Why nobody likes Judge Keller and she should quit and go home

New headaches seem to crop up every day for Presiding Judge Sharon Keller of the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals ever since she refused to accept condemned murderer Michael Richard's last minute appeal. (See prior Grits posts here, here, here, here, and here.)

Yesterday, Richard's widow sued Judge Keller over the decision, saying it "exceeded her authority." A "duty judge" had been assigned to the case, but Judge Keller rejected Richard's appeal without consulting her. For that reason, I disagree with this blogger that the widow has filed a "junk lawsuit." In any event, it's certainly one more headache.

For her sake, I hope Keller owns a dog because nobody else seems to want her around. At this point, for the good of the court and for the sake of the reputation of the Texas justice system, I think the most honorable thing would be for her to resign her seat.

After the national embarassment of Chief Justice Sharon Keller circumventing her colleagues and locking the doors to prevent an emergency death penalty appeal filing after 5PM, the Court of Criminal Appeals has instituted what they say will be a fail-safe email system. ...

The e-mail system will be a stop-gap procedure before the development and implementation of a more wide-ranging electronic case-filing system due for all Texas appeals courts. That system is scheduled for operation in early 2010.

Ya know, if the State is going to execute someone, let's at least follow the law and procedures, and add a dash of common sense and humanity into the equation, including the thought "well SCOTUS is looking at this, why don't we wait the extra 20 minutes to allow the filing of the last minute appeal, and we can execute him later"?

What are you talking about, 1:53? Who used the word "inhumane"? Only you! She violated the open courts doctrine in the Texas Constitution, and usurped the authority of the duty judge whose decision it should have been. I don't know what you're talking about.

Keller has made the jobs of people who enforce the law more difficult by the damage she has done to public trust in the courts.

The police need people charged with crimes to know that they can turn themselves in to the authorities and that they will have the protections of the law and a judge that will administer the law fairly and without bias. Until Keller resigns, who in their right mind would submit themselves to the "justice" of the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals?

RWR, when you're a judge, you don't have the luxury of doing the right thing the wrong way. The ends don't justify the means, and those who think it does, like Judge Keller, do not possess what's known in the biz as "judicial temperament."

Espousing the notion that the Open Courts provision requires a court to never close makes one look like a crank. That’s crayon writ territory.

Cheering on a mob that is going after a judge that you don’t like is brown shirt territory – or, at least, brown something.

This is all especially obnoxious in light of the fact that the origin of this fracas is the shenanigans of Richard’s many post-conviction attorneys. This stay request should have been filed a week before the execution date. And please don’t peddle that nonsense that the Supreme Court had only that day granted cert. This was a commonly urged basis for seeking a stay long before the Supreme Court granted cert.

Perhaps defense attorneys that have screwed up might look at TEX. R. APP. P. 9.2(a)(2), which provides a mechanism to file documents after hours – but that would spoil the chance to make a political point:

"A document is filed in an appellate court by delivering it to: (2) a justice or judge of that court who is willing to accept delivery. A justice or judge who accepts delivery must note on the document the date and time of delivery, which will be considered the time of filing, and must promptly send it to the clerk."

I didn't say the open courts doctrine means courts must never close, but it does mean that they must make emergency provisions for cases where there will be no tomorrow. And there were provisions for emergency filings - i.e., the "duty judge" assigned to the case - whose authority Keller usurped. Procedurally, it simply wasn't Keller's call to make. That's precisely why her peers put forward the e-filing rule. What she did violated the principle that everyone should have access to the courts.

And as Godwin's law implies, labeling Keller's critics "brownshirts" doesn't make what she did right. In fact, she's dead wrong. Texas Monthly three years ago called the CCA Texas' Worst Court, largely because of her. She's turned the court into a national laughingstock, and this case wasn't the first time by a longshot. best,

The fact remains that if someone in power (ie a judge) openly states that they are very much in favour of capital punnishment, it removes their ability to oversee ANY case without prejudice. It is just as bad as prossecution lawyers going in to court BEFORE a trial saying they are going to pursue the death penalty ~ it PREJUDICES the trial.

No one is questioning the convict's guilt. People are questioning whether due process was served by a judge who is known to be biased.

What is TEX. R. APP. P. 9.2(a)(2)? I am not a lawyer. Can someone show me a link so I can see what it says.

Seems to me that Keller also knows about TEX. R. APP. P. 9.2(a)(2), but she purposely mislead the attorneys by telling them that the court closes at 5, when she knew very well that if they contacted the duty judge, they could have submitted their appeal.

She should have told the clerk to tell the attorneys to contact the duty judge. Instead, she acted as if she was the duty judge and told the clerk to tell them "We close at 5". I suspect the attorneys had no idea that she had not consulted with the other judges or the duty judge.

As I said, I am not a lawyer and I had never heard of TEX. R. APP. P. 9.2(a)(2), I am just a regular person trying to understand why a judge would act as Keller did. Since this code exists, and she knows that it exists, she may have purposefully mislead the attorneys that she was speaking for the duty judge or for the whole court. With that as a possibility, then this should be investigated by the Public Integrity Unit of the Travis County District Attorney, which ,as I understand its duties, investigates and prosecutes alleged wrongdoing by public officials.

Oh, and Daniel, I've called Richard a "murderer" and a "scumbag" in this string - I never said he shouldn't be held accountable, and he'll probably still be executed in the end no matter what. All those hackneyed stereotypes you're crowing about don't apply to the positions I've laid out here.

Texas deserves judges we can be proud of, not people who put their personal political agenda over the laws and procedures that should govern their actions. That's what Sharon Keller did, and routinely does, and it's why she shouldn't be a judge.

If you don’t like Judge Keller then feel free not to vote for her. I didn’t (and won’t) vote for many of the judges on the court of criminal appeals. But you and your mob ought to lay off on the personal vilification and intimidation tactics. Instead, try to find a legitimate sales pitch for your abolitionist philosophy.

Those of us who believe in the rule of law are revolted by attempts to intimidate judges. We’re also proud of judges who refuse to put up with stunts from the capital defense bar.

It’s outrageous for defense attorneys to expect an appellate court to kowtow to whatever they want to do just because a defendant is facing a death sentence.

Richard’s attorneys had for months (if not years) been filing pleadings in other cases with lethal injection claims similar to the one they allegedly wanted to file in Richard’s case. In other words, it wasn’t an (allegedly) faulty computer or Judge Keller that prevented this claim from being filed on time. It was the dilatory tactics of Richard’s attorneys.

@ 11:13 - First, for the record, to paraphrase what Hunter Thompson said of Richard Nixon in his administration's final days, this blog was kicking Sharon Keller long before she was down. And I didn't vote for her.

As for Keller, there are many judges who I didn't vote for who I would never call to resign. What she did was over the top and IMO and abuse of her authority for reasons I've made clear. If she'd been the duty judge, I'd be arguing that a complaint was unfounded, whether or not I agreed with her decision - I assure you of that. But that's not what happened. It simply wasn't her call to make to refuse the appeal.

Also, as the Texas Monthly article will make clear, she's not a first offender. She's been turning the CCA into a national laughingstock for years, but as Mike Hall wrote in Texas Monthly, "Nobody is laughing now." Time for her to go, and sorry if it offends you that somebody would say so publicly.

Talk about nobody wanting her around. She attended Red Mass, an invocation of God's grace on the judiciary and its proceedings, last month in San Antonio. Another CCA judge brought her to the event, ostensibly on a rehab tour. Ordinarily, guests flock to judges at these things to shake hands and say hello. Instead, the judges sat in a quiet corner and nobody approached them. Keller made herself a pariah in the legal community. Serves her right.

I did not, however, take notice whether the statue of Jesus wept or whether the holy water burned her during the mass.

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